The Blog

In a previous article, written for this website by David Parnell, he explained that thinking burns glucose and that, it might well be beneficial for retailers to provide customers with access to a small energy boost, perhaps a mint or drink, to help them stay energised for shopping. A new study, whilst not looking at consumers, adds a new dimension to this advice and reinforces its importance for consumer behaviour. It comes from research that has been conducted looking at sentencing patterns of judges. It’s another example of the extent to which we’re nowhere near as rational as we like to tell ourselves. Much as I would like to believe that a judge’s sentence is based on an objective assessment of the facts of the case and a dispassionate application of the relevant laws and sentencing guidelines, the evidence suggests otherwise. A researcher examined more than 1000 parole board hearings […]

In a previous article, written for this website by David Parnell, he explained that thinking burns glucose and that, it might well be beneficial for retailers to provide customers with access to a small energy boost, perhaps a mint or drink, to help them stay energised for shopping. A new study, whilst not looking at consumers, adds a new dimension to this advice and reinforces its importance for consumer behaviour. It comes from research that has been conducted looking at sentencing patterns of judges. It’s another example of the extent to which we’re nowhere near as rational as we like to tell ourselves. Much as I would like to believe that a judge’s sentence is based on an objective assessment of the facts of the case and a dispassionate application of the relevant laws and sentencing guidelines, the evidence suggests otherwise. A researcher examined more than 1000 parole board hearings […]

Last week, my mobile phone provider didn’t send me a SIM card they had promised. In my conversation with the call centre I explained that visiting their store wasn’t a good use of my time; something they might have guessed from my initial decision to have them post the card to me. They said they couldn’t get it to me by the promised date any more (the following day). I was cross. The call centre person decided that it would be a good idea to recap on exactly what she and I had done up to that point. I politely interrupted her and pointed out that, I was getting the impression I valued my time quite a lot more highly than the phone company. I didn’t want a potted history of my (bad) recent experience, I wanted a solution. Oblivious to this and presumably because of some awful training, the […]

It’s hard to regard the success of the Red Bull brand as anything less than astonishing. They took a workers’ energy drink from Thailand and turned it into one of the biggest brands in the world. Not bad for a product that market research taste testing concluded was amongst the worst it had ever presented to respondents. Red Bull realised that taste is not the point. Put the right associations around a product and that determines, to a large extent, how we will experience it when we drink it. We’ve seen studies that show how people’s brains respond differently to the same product at different prices: increase the price and the reward centres of people’s brains will light up more in fMRI scans. In Consumer.ology I wrote about a study by researchers at Duke University who subliminally exposed people to brand logos. They flashed logos for Apple, IBM, Disney and the E! […]